Withdraw remarks on Hindi hegemony, M K Stalin tells Amit Shah

CHENNAI: Joining issue with Union home minister Amit Shah’s reported remarks in a tweet and at a ‘Hindi Divas’ function in the national capital on Saturday that Hindi should be the ‘common language’ for the country and the nation’s identity globally, DMK president M. K. Stalin said the minister’s views are “shocking, painful and detrimental to the country’s unity and integrity”. It also amounted to relegating non-Hindi speaking people as ‘second class citizens’.

Condemning  Shah’s reported remarks and also urging the home minister to withdraw them at the earliest, Stalin, in a statement here and in his press interaction at the DMK office, said it has come in the recent backdrop of several Central departments including railways and postal issuing circulars like ‘exams-in-Hindi-only’ to the exclusion of Tamil and other regional languages.

“The DMK had taken up each one of these issues separately and got them redressed by the Central departments/ ministries concerned and Shah’s announcement has come as a bolt from the blue; the DMK has been firm that such tendencies of Hindi hegemony should be nipped in the bud,” he said.

Stalin further said that after DMK’s ‘Mupperum Vizha’ (starting on September 15, party’s founder-leader C.N. Annadurai’s birth anniversary), being held in Tiruvannamalai this year on Sunday, the party’s high-level policy making committee will meet in Chennai on Monday evening to discuss the strategy to be adopted to counter this language issue. Members of the high level committee including Durai Murugan, T. R. Baalu, Kanimozhi, Dayanidhi Maran and other headquarters secretaries will be participating in the meeting. The meeting has been convened by party’s general secretary Prof K. Anbazhagan.

In the related statement, Stalin pointed out that the Constitution’s preamble very clearly states that India is a union of states. The federal principle is what conjoins the states to the Centre and India’s cultural identity has been ‘unity and diversity’, he said. Each state has its language with their distinct cultural flavours and recognizing this plurality has been a unique aspect of India’s unity, he said.

However,  Stalin regretted that since the BJP forming a majority government on its own, there have been continuous efforts to weaken this notion of a pluralistic state, by asserting the ‘supremacy’ of Hindi and its efforts to subtly impose Hindi on non-Hindi speaking ways in various ways.

Stating that DMK has been opposing Hindi imposition since the party’s inception, Stalin recalled Annadurai’s argument that if Hindi was chosen as the sole national language on the basis that most people spoke it, then by the same logic, ‘crow’ should have been notified as the national bird on their numerical strength.

“Right from Anna’s days, with his birth anniversary falling on Sunday, the DMK has been consistently opposing Hindi imposition, protecting Tamil language and has been a shield for all other regional languages,” Stalin said, adding, the party had also been demanding that all languages listed in the eighth schedule of the Constitution be made official languages of the country.

The DMK, along with like-minded parties, will not hesitate to launch an agitation, he added.